Alex’s Analysis – Quest Guide of a Guide Quest

Well, after 18 years, RuneScape’s first quest finally gets a sequel. … or rather, if we pretend Recipe for Disaster doesn’t exist, it… um…

… OK, it’s just another Cook’s Assistant quest. It’s not even the same cook! But don’t worry, this one’s more competent! He just needs you to gather all the ingredients for a cake so that he can…

… be voted to become the leader of a chef’s association that’s apparently higher than the leader of the Cooks Guild and the official holder of the level 99 Skill Cape. Yeah, better than being late for a birthday party. This is not for a town’s respected leader, it’s for his own personal gain! So much better!

So he tasks you with following a secret recipe that everybody knows about because he’s a local drunk, sends you to an out-of-the-way dairy that’s not on a farm for a specific ingredient, then sends you back again for the other ingredients, and then sends you to go deliver the finished product all over RuneScape and pretend it’s his work because he is too busy manning the guild and… doesn’t have employees to do this sort of thing for him. You know, being a guild master and all…

…

This is a fantastic quest!

So this quest stays to the roots where it’s basically a fetch and go quest. There’s no real turns or twists, nothing to fight (unless you count the tree you chop), and most of the places you need to go have quick teleport options. And that’s the point of it. It’s a tutorial quest, where it teaches the player how to do something in RuneScape that’s comparatively convoluted. It does so by drawing them in with the potential of a good first-time reward (a nice big quest complete window) and a fairly involving story to help maintain interest.

The quest itself is straightforward. There are no new areas in-game, the majority of the characters you interact with already exist (save for the dairy in Falador, which I’m not entirely sure was necessary since there’s the one in east Lumbridge), and the level requirements are fair. Nevertheless, it’s tedious enough to warrant a good effort because there’s quite a bit of running around involved. But that ultimately makes the reward more worth it afterwards.

And what’s the reward? Cheesecake! Cheesecake is like regular cake, where each item has three portions. It’s hard to make, and it doesn’t restore an incredible amount of health compared to some potentially endangered species of fish.

However, unlike regular cake, cheesecake restores prayer points too!

Pretty awesome, eh? The best cheesecake will restore 99 prayer points per section, adding up to about 297 prayer points, which for a higher level player is roughly the equivalent of a… single dose of regular prayer potion. But, it does heal too. Balances out, right? … oh, you’d rather have a six-dose prayer potion and a rocktail instead of two cheesecake…

Oh right, did I mention this is a free-to-play quest?

This is probably the first and only option for edible prayer restoration for free-to-play players. Not to mention since this is a beginner quest and the method for crafting cheesecake, while tedious, is relatively simple and low level, it offers developing players a great asset to supplement their everyday training!

It’s nice because the F2P section doesn’t get a whole lot of updates. Sometimes they get something from the patch notes, or sometimes an item is moved to the non-members side to fit with the layout, but since the big F2P update where they got Taverley and Burthrope (and who could forget Tutorial Island), they haven’t had that much new content to go off of.

At the same time, Jagex exist as a company to make money and pay its hard-working employees. If everything was free, they just wouldn’t last very long. Or, RuneScape would be all covered up in ads and sponsor images. And I do not plan to wear a piece of Masterwork armor branded with Hammacher Schlemmer on the back.

So yes, this isn’t the sequel to Sliske’s Endgame, nor is it really a sequel to the actual Cook’s Assistant quest. It’s a guide to making a complicated food item to aid newer players. It’s tailored to a specific audience. It’s a quick and easy quest.

I approve! We need more of them. Quests are a good way to invite players into new content.

Y’all remember Karamja Idols? No, of course not, because there’s no quest for them. You remember the Nexus? No, it’s a minigame without a quest. You going to remember cheesecake? You probably will try to forget that one.

… or maybe that’s just me. I personally don’t like cheesecake very much. Don’t know the appeal. My RuneScape character seems to enjoy it, though. Yay for Alex 43.

Until next time,

Cheers, cannoneers!

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